Shakespeare Among the Courtesans

Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500-1650

Duncan Salkeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317056676
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Courtesans - women who achieve wealth, status, or power through sexual transgression - have played both a central and contradictory role in literature: they have been admired, celebrated, feared, and vilified. This study of the courtesan in Renaissance English drama focuses not only on the moral ambivalence of these women, but with special attention to Anglo-Italian relations, illuminates little known aspects of their lives. It traces the courtesan from a wry comedic character in the plays of Terence and Plautus to its literary exhaustion in the seventeenth-century dramatic works of Dekker, Marston, Webster, Middleton, Shirley and Brome. The author focuses especially on the presentation of the courtesan in the sixteenth century - dramas by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Lyly view the courtesan as a symbol of social disease and decay, transforming classical conventions into English prejudices. Renaissance Anglo-Italian cultural and sexual relations are also investigated through comparisons of travel narratives, original source materials, and analysis of Aretino's representations of celebrated Italian courtesans. Amid these fascinating tales of aspiration, desire and despair lingers the intriguing question of who was the 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Classical and Early Modern Counterparts

Late in 1539, Maddalena Saltarella left her well-connected Florentine lover, Ugolino Grifoni, and headed for Rome accompanied by two men, a Signior Lactantio and his companion Buondelmonti, each of whom took it in turns to sleep with her. They did not disguise this arrangement: indeed, her entry into the city was pre-announced and showily celebrated. She was thereafter lavishly entertained at banquets and introduced to influential men, in particular a number of elder cardinals whom they regarded, it seems, as contacts worth knowing. She was denounced by the Bishop of Forli as a spreader of syphilis but the slur does not seem to have stuck. Instead, she was fêted by a variety of men and showered with luxurious and expensive gifts. Maddalena received her guests in a gorgeously decorated room surrounded by paintings and tapestries. Such magnificent display proved to any onlooker both her success and her patrons’ largesse. She moved in elite circles, won the admiration of powerful men by her graceful singing and dancing, and became, according to letters sent to Grifoni about her, a living object of desire, her body a trophy to be won. And yet a tax document ten years later reveals a woman of the same name paying only a modest rent for her chambers, indicating that this richesse was apparently short-lived. She had, it seems, fallen from favour.1

Almost sixty years later, on Saturday the first of April 1598, Elizabeth Evans of Stratford-upon-Avon stood facing a more than usually full assembly of magistrates (‘governors’) at London’s Bridewell Hospital.2 The room in which the hearing was held would probably have been very grand, a reminder of its past as Wolsey’s palace, and as an ambassadorial residence. Gathered at the bench were twelve grim-faced London aldermen, including the Treasurer, Master Thomas Box, and two visitors, one of whom was William Fleetwood, the London Recorder, the most senior of the city’s magistrates. To one side sat William Johnson, the hospital clerk who wrote down the case.

Evans had been sent into Bridewell under a special warrant from Fleetwood. He had been tracking her for some days. A week earlier, the court had heard a lengthy witness statement by Mary Holmes, a former serving-maid to Evans, whom she knew as Elizabeth Dudley. Holmes testified that her mistress was ‘of ill reporte and an ill woman of her body’. Evans apparently dwelt at ‘Tutle’ [Tothill] street in Westminster but had moved addresses ever since she arrived in London, some three or four years earlier.3 According to Holmes, she had slept with John Pears, on one occasion locking him in her room and removing his boots and stockings. When Pears’s brother Henry knocked at the door, John grabbed his clothes and hid in an ante chamber. Realising that Evans had been regularly sleeping with John, Henry lamented, ‘Oh Lord would she do so I am sorye that eiuer I did speake for her’. Holmes also testified that Evans ‘told her she hath three hundred pounds a yeare to live one’ [sic]. If true, this would have made Evans one of the wealthiest women in England.

The city authorities had taken just a week to find Evans and gather citizens willing to give evidence against her. Thomas Malin, a brown baker, testified that a Master Nixon, silk merchant, asked him to give lodging to one Elizabeth Carew, a woman said to be of good parentage and means, whom he intended to marry. But while Nixon was away, Evans entertained other clothiers, often staying out late at night. Malin eventually threw her out and she lodged in a succession of houses of ill-fame, including one called ‘the well occupied house’ in Islington. Malin claimed that she received men of ‘good abilitye’ who ‘shortly after became bankrupt and little worth’. She moved to Southwark but her notoriety forced her again north of the river to Abchurch Lane, ‘whither resorted unto her one Jones who named him selfe to be a gentleman of Grayes inne’, yet even here her sojourn was brief and she had to flee ‘secretly’. Two witnesses in this case also came from Stratford-upon-Avon and had known Evans since she was a girl. Joice Cowden, living in Seacole Lane, declared not only that she knew Elizabeth Evans, but that ‘she was borne on Stratford uppon hauen and further she saith that she this examinate went to schole with the said Elizabeth Evans’. Evans’s father had been a cutler in Stratford and was executed for ‘quoining’ or counterfeiting. The record of the case confirms that, ‘the said Joice did go with her the said Elizabeth to schole togither at Stratford uppon hauen’. George Pinder, another Stratfordian in London, corroborated Cowden’s facts and testified that Elizabeth Evans had been in London some ‘three or foure yeares’. Pinder stated he ‘hath hard a verye bad reporte of her’, that her friends were poor, that he did not know how she maintained herself so grandly, and that she had asked him to call her by the name ‘Carew’.

Having been pursued across London by a network of aldermen, sheriffs, deputies, bailiffs and beadles, the game was finally up for Evans and, brought into court, she was compelled to make the following confession:

I, Elizabeth Evans, do acknowledge that I am the daughter of Robert Evans who dwelte sometime on Stratford on haven A cutler in Warkeshire I have called my name sometime Dudley and sometime Carewe but I can shewe no reason that I tooke those names uppon me and further I do confesse I have bin about London three or foure yeares and I do acknowledge that I have lived with losse of my bodye with divers persons diverse and sundrye times for which I am hartelye sorrye and do aske god and her majestie and all her majesties subiectes whome I have offended therebye forgiveness for the saime and do promise by god his grace never hereafter to offend the like fault againe. And in testimonye of the true repentaince and sorrowfullness of my hart and purpose of amendement of my life I have heere set my hand this first day of Aprill 1598 and in the 40 yeere of her majesties Raigne that nowe is.4

In a delicate, controlled and somewhat showy style, Evans signed her name ‘Elis evens’. Her initial capital ‘E’ is elegantly looped at the top and bottom of the down-stroke, and the signature is impressive, graceful, and even fine. For Evans, this should have been one of the most terrifying moments of her life, but the signature shows a perfect command of hand. She had an ally in court, one more powerful than any civic magistrate – Sir William Howard, brother to the Lord High Admiral Charles Howard, the Earl of Nottingham. The first entry in the case, and probably also the last made, gives the court’s judgment as follows:

This daye Elizabeth Evans who named her name to be Elizabeth Dudley and sometime Elizabeth Carewe being sent into this house by Master Recorder his warrant was this daye examined by this court as by her examinacion appeareth. Sir William Howard brother to the Right Honourable ye Lord Admirall being in court did sewe for her enlargement and desired that she should be spared of her punishment for that he thought she was a kinne to him whereuppon she was delivered to him the saide Sir Williamwithout any punishment.5

Escaping London’s notorious Bridewell was a rare feat indeed (see Figure 1.1). Evans had long run considerable risks but they now seemed to have paid off. Her pseudonyms had Warwickshire aristocratic connections. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, famously entertained the Queen at Kenilworth in July 1575. His brother John was Earl of Warwick, and buried in St. Mary’s Church, in the town of Warwick, as he had requested in his will. George Carew, cousin of Sir Walter Ralegh, had married into the Clopton family and was a wealthy Warwickshire landowner. He would later be buried on 2 May 1629 in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. She had been trading on local aristocratic names. Evans could claim to be the richest woman in London because she was sleeping with the brother of one of the greatest men in the English state. We cannot be sure what subsequently happened to her. On 10 January 1598/9, an Elizabeth Evans was arrested and punished for vagrancy and ‘stealing of lynnen clothes out of a garden’ with one Martha Marlin.6 Five years later, a parson, Jervis Scarborough, was alleged to have raped his servant Elizabeth Evans, and his wife to have beaten her.7 On 25 April 1610, an Elizabeth Evans was sent with one Thomas Gaskine for being ‘diseased’ to St. Thomas’s Hospital ‘to be cured’.8

These entries may not refer to the same person, let alone the Stratford coiner’s daughter (the name would have been quite common): yet they point to a cycle of vagrancy, exploitation and violence that rendered any aspiring courtesan’s situation precarious to say the very least. Howard’s brother Charles was patron of the star players at Henslowe’s Rose playhouse, and Evans may well have met actors on Bankside when she was in Southwark, or among the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn where Shakespeare performed in 1594, or at Shoreditch on her way to the ‘well occupied house’ in Islington. It is barely plausible that Shakespeare did not know of her, or her father, and virtually impossible that she had not heard of him.

For all the cultural differences between their situations, the lives of these two women seem to share a similar trajectory. They rose to become the lovers of powerful men and then, so far as we are able to tell, fell from wealth, status and influence back into obscurity and comparative poverty. This book is largely about this arc or movement, from the lure of the dream that a woman could become fabulously wealthy, secure and protected (so long as she sold or gave her body to the right men), to the starker realities and difficulties of women’s lives at this time. Rich men no doubt liked to show off their wealth in gifts to attractive women from whom they expected sex in return. For their part, the women gained all that this uncertain world could offer, the kind of wealth one could scarcely imagine. But many of these women would cruelly awake from this dream and find the world a hard and brutal place once more. The myth of the courtesan can distract even today. Criticism can fall in with the idea that a cultivated, educated and able woman who sells sexual favours might be a pioneer of women’s autonomy and agency in an era of widespread misogyny – a figure to be admired or celebrated. The notion is seductive, but to read the courtesan in this way is to pass over the histories of abuse that often mark their narratives, and to ignore the truth that few women, if any, have ever chosen prostitution as a career because they genuinely liked it. This book addresses both sides of the Renaissance courtesan’s story, the myth and the reality in and beyond the drama. It is also about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. One aim of this book is to underline that many of those contemporaries were women. Some of them Shakespeare probably never knew, like Joan Heliker (see below) or Francis Hudson (in Chapter 3), who were not courtesans but found themselves pregnant, abandoned and destitute. Others like Elizabeth Evans, Lucy Negro or Rose Flower (see Chapter 6), we may assume he did know. These women’s narratives, with all their lacunae, are also the focus of this book.

Fig. 1.1 Bridewell Royal Hospital. From the ‘Agas’ map (1561-70). The middle section originally housed the royal chambers, with the ‘greene’ or south yard towards the Thames and bounded on the left by the’long gallery’. The River F...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Text
• 1 Introduction: Classical and Early Modern Counterparts
• 2 English Prototypes and the ‘foul disease’
• 3 Travellers and the Sex Trade in Early Modern London
• 4 In Between Renaissance Sheets: Making Contact
• 5 Courtesan Culture in Kyd, Marlowe and Heywood
• 6 Shakespeares, the Clerkenwell Madam and Rose Flower
• 7 Vanishing Tricks: Dekker, Marston, Shakespeare and Middleton
• Bibliography
• Index